The Ghost Writer

The Ghost WriterThe Ghost Writer, Roman Polanski's first feature in four years, has its own spectre to contend with. What the world knows about the 76...The Ghost WriterMystery and ThrillerRoman Polanski, Robert HarrisPT128MPG-13The Ghost Writer, Roman Polanski's first feature in four years, has its own spectre to contend with. What the world knows about the 76...2010-02-18Tom WilkinsonOlivia WilliamsTom Wilkinson, Olivia Williams

The Ghost Writer, Roman Polanski’s first feature in four years, has its own spectre to contend with. What the world knows about the 76-year-old filmmaker — that he’s currently under house arrest in Switzerland, still embroiled in his ugly 1977 U.S. case involving sex with a then-13-year-old girl — hovers like a phantom over every frame of this satisfying, melancholy political suspense story. The disturbing information can’t be ignored. But neither ought it distract viewers from a well-made, sleekly retaliatory, pleasurably paranoid tale in praise of enterprising (and also brave) investigative journalists and in condemnation of political skulduggery in general and right-wing Anglo-American collusion in particular. British best-selling author Robert Harris wrote the novel; Harris and Polanski penned the adapted screenplay with a feel for a contemporary movie audience sick to death of headlines about U.S. involvement in covert torture operations.

The ”ghost” of the title — who’s never actually given a name — is a reputable author (thoughtfully played by Ewan McGregor) hired to write the memoirs of controversial former British prime minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan, cast to a T). Feel free to read allusions to Tony Blair in Lang’s situation, since as a journalist, Harris was once close to the ex-PM. Certainly Olivia Williams (An Education), as Lang’s powerful wife, has more than a touch of Cherie Blair’s forthrightness in her. McGregor actually plays a replacement ghost, since a previously hired scribe has died, found drowned in a suspicious accident in the waters between Lang’s secluded beach home on Martha’s Vineyard and the Massachusetts mainland as the story opens.

Polanski and Harris do a jolly good job of letting the circles of untrustworthy characters (including Kim Cattrall, blouse tucked in as Lang’s protective assistant, and Tom ? Wilkinson as a secretive Harvard prof) ripple outward, like rings from a stone thrown into water. Indeed, water figures everywhere — it’s forever raining, and the Ghost rides a bike through sad puddles. Meanwhile, at the shoreline, a severely modern, concrete bunker of a beach house filmed on German location tries to distract us from the evident fact that we’re really not on Martha’s Vineyard. After all, the director, a wanted man in the U.S., can’t set foot there. B+